Poland dismisses Soviet arms re-export allegations
11/10/2006 13:50 WARSAW, October 11 (RIA Novosti) - Poland's national defense minister said Wednesday he knows nothing about the re-export of Soviet arms to Georgia.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said in late September that certain new members of NATO are supplying Georgia with weapons earlier brought to them by the Soviet Union without the right to re-export them.
Radoslaw Sikorski said: "I don't know anything about the re-export of arms from Poland to Georgia. On the other hand, I also don't know that any sanctions have been imposed on Georgia in this respect."
He said he could not imagine that during the Soviet era, the re-export of arms from the Polish People's Republic to Soviet territory could have been banned, adding it was a complex legal matter.
"When we were buying weapons within the framework of the Warsaw Pact, Poland was not a sovereign democratic country," he said. "Compared with Russia, we are a microscopic exporter of arms."
Sergei Ivanov, who is also a deputy prime minister, in voicing Russia's concerns over Georgia's active acquisition of Soviet-era weapons from new NATO members, said conventional weapons laws were being violated.
Moscow and Tbilisi, whose relations have been tense in the last few years, have become embroiled in one of their most serious disputes to date, since Georgia arrested six Russian servicemen in the country on suspicion of espionage.
Relations between the countries had already been tense over Georgia's two separatist republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, where Russian peacekeeping forces have been stationed since the bloody conflicts of the early 1990s.
Former members of the Eastern bloc in Europe - Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia - became member countries of NATO in 2004.
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